Mothers & Daughters: Vareniki

VARENIKI

Summer 1841

Two days later they were playing in the garden when the hostess, their Little Ukrainian, came up to them, asking them to come to her house and try the delicious cherry vareniki she cooked for the sake of “God’s holiday.” (It was Sunday.)

“Vareniki? Ah! What a pity that we can’t!” exclaimed Vera with deep regret.

Owing to Vera’s recent illness, and Lelya’s stomachache, the girls were strictly forbidden to eat cherries. Letting them go into the garden, Antonia reminded them of this, and they gave her their word not to pick cherries. They had religiously kept their oath until now. But, having heard the invitation, Lelya shouted:

“Nonsense! Why can’t you!?”

“Because we promised Antonia, of course!”

“Idiot! What did we promise? We promised not to eat cherries, we made no such promise about eating vareniki made with cherries!”

“Isn’t it all the same?”

“Of course not! Raw cherries are different than boiled cherries! Vareniki are the same as jam and they give us raspberry jam to eat with our medicine, don’t they? Let’s go!”

“Come on over, my dear young ladies!” said the Little Ukrainian woman, who did not know that cherries were forbidden to them. “You must try my wheat dumplings. The yaks dumplings are delicious!”

“Well,” said Vera, getting up, “let’s go!”

The dumplings, indeed, were so delicious! Made from white flour, with selected, ripe cherries and all filled with fresh, honeycomb honey. Their kind Little Ukrainian was a homely housewife. She had her own beehives right there in the front garden filled with sunflowers, mugs, elderberry bushes, and high grass entwined with hops. Because of the bees, however, the girls avoided this garden and only admired its beauty from a distance.

“Oh yes, dumplings!” said the girls between eating and licking their lips. The clay bowl placed on the table in front of them was almost empty when suddenly, to their horror, Masha’s voice was heard through the small window from the garden.

“Lelya! Verochka!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

The girls froze with wooden spoons in their hands and dumplings in their mouths.

“Oh no! What are we going to do, Lelya? They are looking for us! Now they will discover that we are overeating on dumplings with cherries. Masha will tell Antonia, and mamochka! Where should we go? Where can we hide?”

Lelya, who was already scheming, turned to their surprised hostess. “Shut up!” she shouted in a whisper. “Don’t say that we are with you! Say that you haven’t seen us, otherwise they will scold us.”

Saying this, Lelya grabbed Vera and dragged her into the mistress’s bedroom and hid with her under the high feather bed. Huddling together, the Hahn sisters became silent.

Vareniki.^[1]

Masha’s voice from the garden grew louder and more impatient. It was clear that danger was approaching. The voice came closer and closer and finally came right next to the window. Vera struggled to hide her legs (which were slightly sticking out from beneath the bed.)

“Are our young ladies here?”

“No!” the Little Ukrainian answered loudly as if taking something out of the stove with a grabber. “They haven’t been here.”

“And you didn’t see them in the garden?” continued Masha, obnoxiously, bending down to the low window.

“No way!” lied the hostess, banging pots and grips. “Haven’t seen them in the garden, either.”

“How strange?” said Masha, surprised. “But where could they be? Perhaps they climbed over the fence into someone else’s garden…” And with that she went on her way, calling the sisters by name again. As soon as she left, Lelya, all red and disheveled, jumped out from beneath the feather bed. Laughing, she jumped up and down, clapping her hands with pleasure. The hostess laughed too. Vera only mustered a smile, being somewhat ashamed.

“Let’s go home,” said Vera, quietly.

“No! Let’s wait for Masha to move in a completely different direction!” said Lelya with extraordinary animation. “Then we’ll climb out the window and run straight to our porch as if we missed her. It would never occur to anyone that we were here.”

They did so, and returned home safely, lying that they had been playing on the other side of the garden the whole time. No one recognized their deception until they told them about it a long time afterward. The incident never amused Vera, on the contrary, it was very unpleasant. The knowledge that she had betrayed her mother and Antonia weighed heavily on her for quite some time.[2]

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SOURCES:

[1] Zhelihovskaya, Vera Petrovna. How I Was Little. A. F. Devrien. St. Petersburg, Russia. (1898): 199.

[2] Ibid, 197-203.